It was a dark, rainy evening. I walked into the theater. It was cold and dark and smelled of buttered popcorn. In the distance, a dog barked. The trailers started to roll…and….Okay. Actually it was a typical sunny, Southern California afternoon when I saw this.
I’m really curious to hear what die-hard film-noir fans think of this flick. I can’t say I’m specifically a noir fan. I’ve liked as many as I’ve disliked. "China Town" and the "Maltese Falcon" are two all time favorites. The "Salton Sea" is a modern-day attempt at this genre. Technically it’s hard for me to critique. I "think" it is done well for what it is, but I must say that I really disliked this movie. In this case, that might purely be a subjective matter. I was bored, confused, interested, shocked, confused, and pissed one after another while watching it. I guess a movie like this is made for the "ride" but I was made nauseous from it. It was mean and pivoted on revenge. Revenge is a particularly unfulfilling and anxiety-riddled subject, especially when one seemingly does not learn anything from it. Other than the "thrill" it was supposed to create, I have no idea why anyone would want to make or see this movie. And its intermittent "Pulp-Fiction"-like weird interstitials were more annoying and non-sequitor than they were fresh and clever.

I will also add that although this may be the film-noir style, it irritates me when half way through the movie the audience is filled in on missing motivation via flash-backs of what happened before we started watching the story. This has been done effectively in other movies, but it felt really forced here….like purposefully misleading the audience without a really good/clever reason or way of doing it. The whole thing just seemed like a bad subject jammed into an Adobe "Film-Noir" filter with a touch of "Pulp-Fiction" for flavoring. I was not interested or entertained by this flick.